Sunday, January 22, 2012

So, I was reading reviews of some Android phones late last night and noticed that a lot of places are still testing OpenGL performance with NeoCore. It's old enough that it basically runs at 60fps on every device out there, and is actually OpenGL 1.1 based besides. It seems like it's kind of past its prime.

As we have a lot of OpenGL using wallpapers, I figured I'd take a stab at putting together a simple benchmark program using some of the same materials. This flew together pretty fast once I started going with it, it's definitely not really finished yet but it works and delivers logical results. I figured I'd get it out there and see if anybody's interested in using it.

So, you'll see there are three tests it runs, then averages the results. The logic I went with was to try to stress something different with each test. Here's what each one does:

The Bamboo test leans very heavily on geometry and vertex shader performance. It renders 75 models, each of which is about 2000 vertices. The vertex shader uses sin/cos to bend the stalks based on the vertex's Z height, then calculates a texture coordinate based on a light vector. They're rendered front to back with depth buffering using an interleaved model, with a very simple pixel shader that does one texture sample.

The Wavescape test leans very heavily on fillrate and texture samples. The geometry here amounts to maybe a thousand vertices, but the post-processing requires two levels of full-screen render to texture, with the light ray trails doing 12 texture samples to create the smooth blur effect. Screen resolution vs GPU speed makes a huge difference here.

Finally, the Galactic Core test stresses CPU and the driver's handling of draw calls. Primarily, it's a particle system consisting of 1024 particles orbiting a center point. Each particle spins based on its distance from the center, and each particle is its own small model, resulting in a very large number of draw calls and uniform updates.

I had a good time putting this together, and will hopefully have some time to nurture it into a more proper product given some time. Meanwhile, hopefully some folks will get use out of it.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

The main thing here was to follow proper display rules. Much like the US flag, the Australian flag (and its states, and New Zealand, and Fiji it looks like...) expect the corner field to be in the upper-left when displayed vertically against a wall. That's the situation this wallpaper operates under, so this update brings us into proper alignment there. That was a stupid mistake, sorry about that folks.

In addition, we added the Australian Aboriginal flag in this update. According to Wikipedia it does have some official status. A comment brought this to our attention, and we're happy to get it in the list.

Friday, January 20, 2012

Australia Day is coming up any time now, so it seemed appropriate to finally get them represented in our Flags lineup! Flags of Oceania contains a bunch of flags from all around the Australia/oceania region of the world, including all the Australian states!

Thursday, January 19, 2012

If you're trying to use non power-of-two textures on a PowerVR based device, and you're confused about why it refuses to render them half the time, there is indeed logic behind it. PowerVRs will only render an NPOT texture if you don't have tiling enabled. Break out CLAMP_TO_EDGE and all will be well.

We'd primarily been testing on a Tegra at the time this came up, and it took a while before we realized what was going on. Hopefully this note saves somebody some headache in the future!

Saturday, January 7, 2012

We've over time gotten a lot of requests to add flags from other regions to either EU Flags or NA flags, but kind of wanted to avoid making things too bloated. Still, it's no good leaving people disappointed, so we've gone ahead and put together a full package covering all of Central and South America! Like our other flags products, this contains a selection of attractive backgrounds, multiple flag rendering styles, and all the nations of the area.

There's likely more to come (we may add the Caribbean to this list), but for now here's all the included countries. Enjoy!